Source: Al-Hayat
Date: 2009-04-21
He has worked in 70 countries. His accuracy in covering events is well-attested to. Everyone waits for his solid reports. He has never been subjected to harassment. Those responsible for his work have no criticisms about his professionalism. He is the British journalist Jeremy Bowen, who joined the BBC in 1985. He was trusted by viewers, before officials. His problems began in 1995, when he took up responsibility for supervising the BBC's Middle East division. Israel and the Zionist lobby brought attention to him, fearing his professionalism and accuracy in editing the news.
Last week, after a one-year long investigation, the BBC's Trust found that Bowen had violated the institution's editorial guidelines. How?
Last June, Bowen published an article on the BBC website entitled "How 1967 defined the Middle East." He wrote that "Zionism's innate instinct to push out the frontier" and a "defiance of everyone's interpretation of international law except its own" dictated the course of the war and its consequences, especially after Israel's rejection of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which call for a withdrawal from the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Bowen wrote that Israeli generals used the war to deal with the "unfinished business" of 1948, i.e. expelling the Palestinians and occupying the rest of Palestine as part of their state. The BBC Trust decided that Bowen had violated the institution's guidelines on neutrality, accuracy and honesty, because readers might deduce from the article that there is no other interpretation, i.e. Israeli interpretation, of the war. It is the right of this other to express his opinion, so the Trust decided to amend the article.
The other error made by Bowen was in January, when he filed a piece for the program "From Our Correspondents." He said that the US does not recognize the Har Homa (Abu Ghneim) settlement and considers it illegal. The trustees (i.e. the censors) took him to task for not specifying the American source for the information; a lack of specification led to inaccuracy and bias.
It is thus censorship by the BBC. It is a censorship that did not move against Bowen until he took on responsibility for Middle East affairs. The region is different from all of the regions whose news and wars he has covered. It differs because it has Israel. The clearest evidence of the BBC's bias has been its refusal to broadcast an appeal for humanitarian organizations for aid for the children of Gaza. It is biased because it does not take into consideration international resolutions that condemn the occupation of the Palestinian territories. It does not see Jewish settlements as contravening international law. It uses the Hebrew name for the Abu Ghneim settlement. Journalists are obliged to use the term "targeted killing" instead of assassination, when the Israeli army assassinates a Palestinian official or attacks houses and kills children, on the pretext that it housed an official.
I will not say, along with Robert Fisk, that the BBC Trust's decision against Bowen "is cowardly, outrageous and ethically dishonest." I will not affirm, with Fisk, that the BBC's journalists are "lions being led by donkeys." But I will say, like Charles Dickens, that "the law is a donkey," which needs a person to steer it. Here, we find it being steered by censorship, toward the Israeli interest.
No one can appreciate the level of censorship-related pressure to which BBC journalists are subjected like Arab journalists, who are subject to 22 censorship bodies and unknown laws applied in arbitrary fashion.
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